Electrically assisted manufacturing

The goal of any manufacturing engineer is to produce quality parts as efciently and cost-effectively as possible. For many of the common engineering materials, this can be accomplished rather easily; however, it has proven challenging with many of the stronger, more lightweight materials that are being implemented into today’s manufacturing processes. These materials, such as high-strength aluminum-, magnesium-, copper-, and titanium-based alloys, all possess great strength-to-weight ratios, but their limited formability makes them impractical for use in many real-world applications that require complex part geometries. Currently, the main downfall in using these materials to make complicated shapes is the fact that one entire blank cannot be used to form the shape, but numerous simpler parts must rst be formed and then attached using screws, rivets, or welds.